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Messenger: Finding a regional solution to St. Louis crime problem

Last month, Kreie published his proposal on the St. Louis Strong website (stlstrong1764.org). The nonprofit was started by Chesterfield native Jake Hollander, who left a public relations job in Washington to come back to his hometown and be a part of the movement to unite the city and the county. Lately, the website has been asking people to weigh in with ideas for consolidation in the region.

In February, Kreie started comparing crime numbers and home values in various cities across the country, and what he found surprised him. St. Louis, it turns out, has the largest disparity between suburban crime and urban crime in the country, based on how he breaks down the numbers by ZIP code. He expected to find home values correlating with low suburban crime, but that’s not what the numbers showed. Plenty of places with similarly low suburban crime have much higher home values than St. Louis.